This feels like a business opportunity to set up a system where the developers don't get screwed. It would be fairly easy to rig up something that operates on something like 2% + S3 + PayPal fees... devs would keep something like 92-94% and still get all of the ratings and hosting stuff taken care of automatically. It wouldn't be hugely profitable, but maybe some easy passive income. The hardest part would be dealing with serial keys and whatnot.

I couldn't really tell from the article whether this is still an issue, getting worse, getting better, affecting Cliff specifically or indie devs in general, etc., but the profit-taking at 50% is just highway robbery. Maybe that made sense at one point when bandwidth was very expensive and these systems were a huge PITA to set up, but a lot of experienced web programmers could rig up something to deal with payments, reviews/user ratings, hosting and all of that stuff in a weekend or two. Hell, if I could get a couple of devs to sign on board, I'd do it myself.

Of course it's not "truly" independent, but rigging up a sellable web app to do the same thing as compared to one central repository of stuff wouldn't be a whole lot tougher.

firehead: what you are basically proposing is and "indie" download site, one that does not engage in highway robbery or expect huge proceeds. While it may or may not work (i haven't a clue about the industry but what i read here), it's not the point of the article.
What Harris wants is indie devs making a stand for themselves, instead of just accepting what others impose on them.

The fact is that independant spirits are far and few between, and those with business sense even more scarce. This goes not just for devs, but for humans in general. Those that do have agressive business skills quickly professionalise whatever branche they occupy, thereby beating out the creative spirit and spontaneous nature of other occupants.

There's not much you can do about this, as it's basic human nature to not bother when you are getting robbed by a man wearing a suit. What you can do is make sure that you yourself are working the way you'd want to.

"It just saddens me that all the people with any aggressive business sense work for them and don't run indie games companies to retain some balance" - Well, there's nothing else to add. Cliff wrote nice article...for I always gain a bit more insight into indie development after reading such articles.